Both had fallen from the ideals which created them; the ideal of truth,
justice, and spotless honor, and the ideal of divine love and mercy.
Even the semblance of truth and justice and honor had departed from the
one; and unspeakable corruption had crept into the other. From the day
of the Albigensian cruelties, the heart of the Church had turned to
stone, and the spark of life divine within seemed extinguished. Once
the guardian of the helpless, it had deserted the people and made
common cause with their oppressors. One pope at Rome, and another at
Avignon, was a heavy burden to carry. But when _three_ infallible
beings were hurling anathemas at each other, the University of Paris
led Christendom in rejecting them all.

So the two great classes for which the State existed were overweighting
the ship at a time when it was being torn and tossed by a storm of
gigantic proportions.

Well was it for France that Charles VII., as king, developed unexpected
firmness and ability. The creation of a standing army, and the
disbanding of all military organizations existing without the king's
commission, at one sweeping blow completed the wreck of feudalism. It
only remained for Charles's cold-blooded son, Louis XI., to finish the
work, and mediaevalism was a thing of the past in France.

The reign of Charles was imbittered by the conduct of this unnatural
son, whose undisguised impatience to assume the crown so alarmed him
that it is said he shortened his own life by abstaining from food in
the fear that the dauphin might lay the guilt of parricide upon his
soul.

This heart-broken, desolate old man died in 1461. And Louis XI. was
King of France.

The son of Charles VII. was a composite of the wisest and the worst of
his predecessors. Indeed, it is to the Roman emperors we must look for
a parallel to this monster on a throne. And yet, to no other king does
France owe such a debt of gratitude. His remorseless hand placed a
great gulf between the new and the old, in which were forever buried
the men and the system which had fed upon her life.

The antagonism between the son and the father aroused great hopes of a
reversal of policy and a rehabilitation of feudalism. These hopes were
soon undeceived. So inscrutable and so tortuous was the policy of this
strange being, so unexpected his changes of direction, so false and
inconsistent his words and acts, and so unspeakably cruel the means to
his ends, that a cowed an